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Director's Column

Beginning this month, we will be accepting applications for the NIH Director’s ARRA Pathfinder Award to Promote Diversity in the Scientific Workforce. This program challenges the research community to develop new approaches to biomedical workforce diversity. We hope that creative scientists will accept this challenge. We anticipate making five, 3-year awards, for $2 million each, to stimulate the development of new ideas to address this very difficult problem.

Public Health Service-supported scientists are accountable for the protection of research animals’ welfare and must provide a thorough, written justification for animal use in their application. OER’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) has developed new resources to assist investigators, peer reviewers, and NIH staff when preparing and reviewing this section.

Beginning January 1, 2011, xTrain, NIH’s electronic appointment system, will be required for nearly all NIH institutional research training grants, fellowships, education and career development awards. By using xTrain, program directors and administrators for these grants can now forgo paper appointment forms and appoint students and postdoctorates to training grants and scholars to career development awards electronically.

In fiscal year 2007, the NIH implemented a major policy change to ensure consistency in the awarding of tuition, fees and health insurance on Kirschstein-NRSA training grants and fellowships. NIH has now formally adopted the policy and will continue to apply it to all future awards.

New Resources

The new All Personnel Report, part of the PHS 2590 Progress Report, replaced the Senior/Key Personnel Report last fall. This change generated a number of questions. See answers to many of these questions in this newly posted set of Frequently … Continue reading →